Ribble Sportive Racing Black

Fast carbon endurance bike that smooths out the road

Lightweight, responsive and comfortable, the Sportive Racing is our flagship carbon endurance bike. This is a performance carbon road bike that’s specifically designed to keep you comfortable during long sportives and all-day riding exploits.

The Sportive Racing has built its award winning reputation on providing a comfortable ride and perfect positioning without comprising on performance features that make it a fast, efficient road bike.

Choose the Sportive Racing that suits your exact budget and you’ll get a great all-round road riding package with sporty performance and long-distance comfort.

Build your perfect bike with BikeBuilder™

We also offer unmatched customisation of your Ribble with our Advanced BikeBuilder. The Advanced BikeBuilder is where you can make more of your own decisions - choose your ideal groupset and wheels, personalise it with your own colour and preferred finishing kit - the choices are all yours.

FOCUSED ON FAST ENDURANCE RIDING

"Perfectly equipped for anything the road throws at you. It’s responsive and fast enough to give a real thrill." BikesEtc

The Sportive Racing is the best-selling bike in our endurance road range of bikes focused on riders rather than racers.

The endurance geometry of the Sportive Racing gives riders a more relaxed and upright riding position that is ideally suited to those longer days in the saddle. Complimentary aspects of this smart frame design are performance focused and make this bike fast as well as comfort-orientated.

"Comfort is not the be all and end all with an endurance bike. You still want a bike that is able to respond and give an exciting ride when you want to put the hammer down." Cycling Weekly.

CLASS LEADING AWARD WINNER

Riders (and cycling press reviewers) are consistently thrilled with how the Sportive Racing bike handles – it offers a comfortable ride without compromising on speed and agility. The Sportive Racing has showed its class leading ability, and value-for-money, to win a number of category awards:

The comfort aspects of the Sportive Racing frame come in part from a slightly longer wheelbase than a more race-orientated road bike. With a tall head tube and short top tube, the Sportive Racing puts you in a less stretched out position with slacker frame angles complimenting the focus on comfort.

At the rear of the frame the small rear triangle and large wishbone seat stay design increases the responsiveness and stiffness of the frame making the bike accelerate as soon as you get out of the saddle. Targeted carbon layups boost stiffness around the bottom bracket which is a press fit design to maximise the power transfer from pedals to rear wheel.

The Sportive Racing is not as twitchy or aggressive as a race bike yet it's been designed to be stiff where it needs to be and responsive under acceleration or when climbing. The full carbon construction uses Toray’s T700/T800 fibres in an optimised layup design that ensures the right amount of material creates a hand-built frameset that is stiff and compliant in the correct areas.

The riding position and frame compliance make this a great bike for all-day comfort on long rides and with quick handling it provides the ideal balance of position, comfort and speed.

"The down tube, tapered head tube, huge PF30 bottom bracket shell and massive chainstays mean the Ribble certainly lays the power down on the road." road.cc

Advanced Bikebuilder For Further Options

We also offer unmatched customisation of your Ribble with our Advanced BikeBuilder. The Advanced BikeBuilder is where you can make more of your own decisions - choose your ideal groupset and wheels, personalise it with your own preferred finishing kit - the choices are all yours.

Ribble Sportive Racing Black Press Reviews

It certainly bodes well for Ribble's next generation range – if the firm's team keep up this level of progress, they'll certainly be giving the heads at some of the world's biggest bike brands some sleepless nights.

Well it seems that Ribble has stepped up its ambitions, beginning to design and develop its own creations – and the first to come to fruition is this, the all-new Sportive Racing – which scooped the Best Value gong in our sister mag Cycling Plus's recent Bike of the Year awards.

The in-house design and development has led to this classy looking angular frame design and geometry – a very northern English road man's take on a sportive/gran fondo frame. The head tube angle of 72 is slacker than a race bike, yet the seat tube's 73 is classic road stuff.

The 1017.9mm wheelbase adds stability, and paired with a 391mm reach and 596mm stack its just a little taller and a little shorter than what you’d expect of a classic road race bike, though its closer to a race bike than an out-and-out endurance machine. The frame weight of 1100g and fork at 390g isn’t especially light by cutting edge standards, but its not exactly carrying extra timber either.

When you add into the mix a full complement of mechanical Dura-Ace, Ksyrium Elite wheels and one of the lightest cockpits you can find courtesy of Deda’s brilliant Superleggera setup, you get a complete bike that tips the scales at just a little of the 7kg mark.

Out on the road you notice the classiness of the equipment, with the Dura-Ace drivetrain and brilliant 9000 series brakes giving slick, smooth, light shifts and dependable braking full of feedback. The lightweight Ksyrium wheels make speedy progress easy: get into the climbs and the low weight, great gear ratios and the chassis' nimble feel add up to a steed that positively revels in long, tough ascents.

The handling is quick and the frame is impressively stiff, making this Ribble a very capable descender too. The inherent rigidity is countered a little by the 25c stock rubber, plus a decent saddle in the form of a Fizik Arione VS (though it's worth mentioning that the saddle's channel seems superfluous – the standard Arione feels more comfortable, because on occasions you feel the edges of the channel rather then the pressure relief its designed to give).

The front end feels light – no real surprise with the sub-200g bar and sub-100g stem. We can’t ever recall a cockpit of this quality on any bike at this price (or on substantially more expensive ones either). Even with this class setup and 25c tyres though, the front end with its deep bladed fork legs, which shape into a box section at the dropouts, is very firm. This does mean a fair bit of buzz makes it to your hands when riding on rougher surfaces. We can live with it, but it means the Sportive’s chassis doesn’t feel quite as accomplished as the likes of Trek’s Domane, or Cannondale’s Synapse.

We can forgive some of the frames shortcomings when the spec list reads as well as this does though. When you add up the cockpit, wheels, saddle, seatpost and groupset, it's like Ribble isn't just giving you the frame but a four-figure golden hello as well. The downside is that this bike is part of Ribble’s special edition range, so the numbers will be fairly limited and it won’t be around forever. Rest assured they will all sell; it’s just too much of a bargain to ignore.

The other drawback is that the frame doesn’t quite live up to the sum of the bikes parts – though it’s still far more accomplished, and far better overall, than the previous incarnation. When you consider Ribble's rivals have full-time design teams and development budgets that run into thousands and thousands of dollars, we think the Lancashire upstarts should be commended for making such a decent machine.

It certainly bodes well for Ribble's next generation range – if the firm's team keep up this level of progress, they'll certainly be giving the heads at some of the world's biggest bike brands some sleepless nights.